Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Starbucks

We thought this message from our friends at SumOfUs was important enough to pass along.

Dear Friend,

Starbucks stuck its neck out to publicly support the right of all people to marry, regardless of the gender of their partner.

Now it is under attack by the ironically named, ultra-conservative "National Organization for Marriage."1 Already more than 20,000 NOM members have pledged to boycott Starbucks, and NOM is even threatening to run ads against Starbucks in 55 countries.

Let's blow the right wing out of the water by getting more than ten times as many consumers to thank Starbucks for standing up for gay marriage.

NOM is targeting Starbucks because the company recently stood up publicly to support gay marriage legislation in their home state of Washington.2 When it passed, the bill's lead sponsor said that support from business convinced moderate legislators to vote for it. Without support from companies like Starbucks, the gay marriage law might have failed.3

Now, if Starbucks backtracks because of opposition, then it will set the gay rights struggle back to a time when big corporations couldn't come out and support gay people for fear of public backlash. Even worse, it will embolden anti-gay activists to target other companies that support gay rights, and serve as a lesson to other companies to stay out of the fight for equal rights entirely.

Starbucks isn't perfect—and in the future we'll probably be asking them to improve their policies on other issues. But it's a big deal when a giant multinational corporation with no particular connection to the gay community realizes that there are real business benefits—from better employees to happier customers—to standing up for progressive ideals. And we can't just criticize corporations when they do bad. We also want to encourage them when they do good.

Let's show that supporting equal rights is good business. Click here to add your message to our Thank You card:

P.S. Breaking News: NOM had a strategic memo released against their will this week, where they plainly state their goal of driving a "wedge between gays and blacks."4 They even wanted to delay Latino "assimilation" so they could make "support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity—a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation."5Driving wedges between people and groups is NOM's stock in trade. That's why this isn't just about Starbucks, it's about standing up against these divisive tactics. Click here to thank Starbucks.

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